Battlefield: Bad Company 2 (Xbox 360)
When I booted up Battlefield: Bad Company 2, I did so in anticipation of more time spent with the lovable losers of B Company from the first game. To my surprise, this military first-person shooter instead opens back in World War II where a new group of soldiers who behaved far more seriously were the main focus. As I continued to play, I slowly grew to accept that this might be the new direction for the plot and prepared myself for a game with an all new cast and tone… only for the mission to conclude and jump back to the present day where I was back in the boots of Preston Marlowe for another adventure with the Bad Company.
Seemingly not too concerned with explaining how B Company ends up back in the U.S. military’s good graces after going rogue in the search of gold in the previous game, Battlefield: Bad Company 2 focuses in on that war between the United States and Russia that the characters didn’t pay much mind to before. Russia has managed to spread their power across the globe to an impressive degree, the situation a bit more dire and as a result, the plot does focus in more on a truly dangerous threat to the world. Russia has its hand on an incredibly powerful weapon that was the focus of that World War II flashback, and seemingly through a mix of expendability and proximity, B Company end up the ones put in charge of trying to get the weapon out of their hands. Still, the four soldiers who make up the group are quite the characters, Preston Marlowe even stepping up a little bit now that he’s more comfortable with his squad mates. Preston is still not given too much of a focus since he’s primarily the perspective character, but he’s more willing to make bets about how things will go or speak his mind compared to his “all business” approach in the previous game.
Unsurprisingly though, the other members of B Company still remain the highlight of the game’s writing and storytelling. Haggard is the most exaggerated character, the explosives-loving Texan still given plenty of time to be a football-loving everyman who isn’t afraid to speak his mind. Sweetwater, the most intelligent of the group, is a nervous chatterbox who can provoke more conversations while Sergeant Redford, known as Sarge, keeps the group in line with his more focused hardline behavior. Still, Sarge will bend when he knows its time to do what’s right rather than what is ordered of them, and while he still can’t quite get that retirement that’s been dangled over him for two games now, he does help the group hold together and there are many times in cutscenes and after firefights you’ll enjoy hearing any member speak. One unfortunate element of speaking during normal play though is that the voices of your squadmates require some degree of proximity to hear, meaning that sometimes the group can be a bit spread out and you’ll have to walk around a bit to better hear who is talking. These conversations are also some of the best moments to show off the comedic side of the story so it’s a bit of a shame there’s a little trouble in cleanly listening in, but there are also now subtitles during cutscenes and new characters like Flynn, the pacifist hippy helicopter pilot whose amusing clashes with Haggard make seeing your ally in the skies always a pleasant sight.
Battlefield: Bad Company 2 does want you to take this plot seriously overall with some legitimate stakes for the central characters and dramatic swerves, but they don’t ruin the fun and the large scope of trying to stop the superweapon also leads to B Company traveling to a variety of locations. The snowy tundra of Russia has segments where you need to make sure you stick near heat sources to survive while South American jungles provide much more cover than the usual structures and level geometry. An impressive improvement to the Battlefield series’s focus on environmental destruction even leads to areas that are impressive to watch crumble over the course of a skirmish. Buildings in the original Battlefield: Bad Company game could be rendered to rubble, but now if you blast down the walls enough you can watch a structure fold in on itself and crush anyone within, meaning there’s a new strategic angle to destroying cover rather than just revealing the people hiding behind it. Some levels in the campaign are definitely meant to show of more impressive damage like a section with very fragile walls where shotgun blasts in tight quarters easily tear through everything around you, but it’s hard not to marvel even at obvious setpieces because it takes battles much further beyond just trying to line up your sights on enemy soldiers.
Areas like logging camps and a dried up bay with old fortifications on what once were islands certainly help diversify the areas you visit in the campaign and even when you’re doing something like pushing up through a drainage ditch, you can feel the way a battle should be approached shift in ways that benefit that overall glut of variety. There are a wide range of weapons to utilize as well, the range familiar with things like submachine guns, assault rifles, sniper rifles, and shotguns, but you can certainly warm up to some favorites as not every weapon of one type is utilized in the same way. Recoil can make an automatic a bit useless at long range while another of the same weapon class could be a good stand-in for a sniper rifle thanks to its quick burst shots and little impact on your aim, and while the word “shotgun” often conjures the image of a pump action, you also have weapons that look a bit more like assault rifles and can be fired more quickly to boot. A more important touch is that Battlefield: Bad Company 2 takes the idea of its predecessor having collectible weapons and makes it have a purpose beyond a scavenger hunt. Any weapon you find in the campaign will be added to a collection you can access at air drops, meaning you have a greater control over what you bring into a fight and even if you might need to swap tools around due to ammo concerns, you can eventually return to a favored gun or even adjust your approach to a mission.
Death in a campaign level will set you back to a checkpoint and your health is now handled through a regenerative system where you can only recover if you avoid taking fire for a short bit. Battlefield: Bad Company 2 won’t always hold back either, some sections like a chase where you’re mounting a turret on the back of a humvee not afraid to ask you to hit your shots well or you’ll be torn up before you have time to heal. Vehicles in general have finite health though and they do add a lot to both the single-player and online multiplayer. Some like the bikes are just used for getting places faster, but a tank or helicopter can tip a battle pretty heavily, especially since Battlefield: Bad Company 2 shirks the previous game’s approach to balance. Tanks are much sturdier now even against tools specifically made to destroy them, and there are moments where this can be a legitimate problem. It’s fine to have a powerful tool to help turn the tides in a conflict, but across multiple matches in Atacama Desert (the earlier mentioned dried up bay) I found players would get tanks into the enemy base and limited player spawns mean the tank could just sit there and instantly kill players the moment they appear. It can definitely feel like the balance is tipped more towards a certain team on a few of the maps, but this extreme example is not only something that won’t always appear on Atacama Desert, but thankfully not such a persistent problem that the multiplayer modes would lose their overall appeal.
Battlefield: Bad Company 2 has four ways to play against other human players online. Rush involves one team needing to defend crates the other team will be trying to destroy. The attackers can run in and set timed charges to try and destroy the crates, but they need to be careful, the team sharing a collective pool of lives that will lead to a loss if fully depleted. The defenders can be a bit looser in endangering themselves since they don’t have to pay tickets to come back to life, but over in Conquest, both teams will utilize ticket respawns that are influenced by who controls a set of specific points on the map. Taking a control point involves being close to that area’s flag for long enough and it can take a fair bit of time for the flag to flip to your team’s colors, but hold enough of the points and the enemy will lose tickets passively. Squad Rush slims down the teams to four players each and removes vehicles for a more skill-focused approach to the mode even though it removes some of the exciting elements of the huge scale conflict found in 24 player battles, but Squad Deathmatch feels quite differently since four teams face off instead to earn 50 kills first and each death feels a bit more meaningful to the grand scheme of the battle. Squads are an important feature of Battlefield: Bad Company 2’s multiplayer, a team made up of a few squads where players who need to come back to life can immediately appear alongside a squad mate but not other teammates. This can lead to a bit of strategy if you coordinate with your squad and can sometimes avoid the spawn camping problems provided someone is out there in the field.
Multiplayer battles are heavily influenced by the map shape and vehicle availability and even in the larger player battles there’s definitely a different feel between the Nelson Bay’s snowy forest village where you might have trouble spotting other soldiers and Isla Inocentes where things kick off with a raid on an island that allows the defenders to manage the space well despite being packed in. Players are free to pick from a set of four classes for their soldier when spawning in, although funnily enough some of the classes will take some time to even match their name. By playing as a class more in online matches you’ll gradually unlock new weapons and tools for them, and while this is a fine way to incentivize long-term play by having more automatic weapons available to someone like the Assault class whose purpose is to be a flexible infantry soldier, the Engineer and Medic due start off hampered because of this system. The Medic still has a capable light machine gun and the engineer gets a rocket launcher to cause some trouble, but the Engineer’s repair tool for vehicles is an unlockable and more importantly, the medic takes some time to unlock the med kits they can throw out or even the fairly powerful defibrillator that allows you to revive fallen teammates. Other unlockables like Anti-Tank Mines definitely reward players with more time in the game and make it a bit rougher for new players to go up against a team made up of veterans, but a Recon troop can still of course kill just as easily with a sniper rifle no matter the player’s time investment so you can still earn some wins even if your team is not as well equipped.
THE VERDICT: An excellent campaign brimming with ideas for new locations and battle situations that is enhanced even further by the amusing behavior of your squadmates definitely ensures Battlefield: Bad Company 2 is at least on par with its predecessor, so while it stumbles a bit with game balance in the multiplayer, it definitely still holds a lot to excite and impress the player. The environmental destruction is layered and influential, benefiting any battle where it can be used as a tool for shifting the shape of the fight, and most online maps do still lead to battles with unique identities.
And so, I give Battlefield: Bad Company 2 for Xbox 360…
A GREAT rating. The phrase goes “one step forward, two steps back”, but Battlefield: Bad Company 2 feels a bit more like a “one step forward, one step back” improvement on the previous game. The new destruction system can lead to all sorts of new ways to engage with the area you’re fighting in and the game manages to realize it in a dynamic and organic manner where you don’t feel the artificial hand of the game as it caves in that roof you brought down thanks to smart animation direction. The campaign meanwhile may be trying to tell a more serious tale than the previous game, but you also get a lot more focus in on the characters of B Company in regards to who they are between them cracking jokes or showing off their quirks. The creativity that comes from mission structure and locations inevitably spills over some into multiplayer so most maps are successful in being distinct and engaging battlefields even if the vehicles feel a bit too sturdy this go around. It used to be that foot-soldiers had the tools to easily turn things against vehicles so both sides of the conflict had to approach things intelligently, but the vehicles that are still easy to get your hands on now can dominate a little too well in some scenarios which can lead to scenarios like the spawn camping in Atacama. Most online matches I played I did find would have some skew towards players with defibrillators or natural map advantages like vehicle availability, but there were still many exciting battles over control points, desperate rushes to try and detonate crates, and skirmishes that show that the weapons and environment do allow for exciting conflict independent of how many hours the participating players put into unlocking things.
The best Bad Company game would probably be some amalgamation of the two where the tone, writing, and health system of the first game were transplanted onto the destruction system and level design of the sequel, but both titles are still excellent and even stand out from each other rather than one easily claiming superiority. Both will unfortunately lose their online component come December of 2023, but some rollicking campaigns with squadmates you’ll want to stop the excellent firefights just to listen in on will survive beyond the multiplayer mode’s discontinuation. Perhaps the game could have survived still if it had gone for that purely serious route the opening showed, but Battlefield: Bad Company 2 effectively places the irreverent B Company into its plot without feeling like a tonal mishmash and makes sure the action is there to match with both well-honed battle systems and over the top destruction.